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Social Activism and Anti-Blasphemy Laws in Mauritania: the Mkhaitir Affair (2014-19)
April 11, 2022 @ 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
The court case of Mohamed Mkhaitir, imprisoned in January 2014 and released in July 2019, caused considerable controversy in Mauritania and abroad. After a Facebook post critiquing the stratified social order among Mauritania’s Hassaniyya Arabic speakers that used examples from Islamic history, Mkhaitir was accused of apostasy and sentenced to death. This presentation focuses on the Mauritanian state’s efforts to reconcile its commitment to democratic values (central to its relations with key Western partners) and a complex sociopolitical hermeneutics based on the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence. It will also present how a new antiblasphemy law, directly related to Mkhaitir’s case, reflects the state’s attempt to silence critics and quash the potentially revolutionary ambitions of certain segments of the population.
FRANCISCO FREIRE is assistant professor of anthropology at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (NOVA FCSH), Portugal. From 2017 to 2021 he was the principal investigator of the Capsahara research project (http://capsahara-cria.fcsh.unl.pt/), funded by the European Research Council. His research has focused on the processes of identity reconfiguration among the Hassaniyya-speaking populations of Mauritania and the broader western Saharan region. He is currently studying the role of new political and religious social actors who question a pervasive social idiom associated with the western regions of the Sahara.
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